Bloomberg Says He Has Qualms About Charging an 8-Year-Old

By DIANE CARDWELL

Published: May 25, 2006

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said yesterday that he had reservations about pursuing charges against an 8-year-old Brooklyn boy who the police say released the emergency brake on a parked school bus, which then fatally crushed a young girl.

''This is an 8-year-old child -- I don't know what facing charges means,'' Mr. Bloomberg told reporters at a news conference on Staten Island. ''This was not a child who has a history of taking a gun and going out in the street. This is a child who tragically did something that if it wasn't so tragic you'd describe as a prank.''

The boy was charged by the police on Tuesday with criminally negligent homicide in the death of the girl, Amber Sadiq, 8, of Crown Heights. But the city's Law Department, which handles juvenile cases, is deciding how to proceed.

Amber was killed on Monday afternoon when the empty bus, parked near a school in Crown Heights, rolled down Nostrand Avenue as she was crossing the street.

Elizabeth Brady, deputy chief of the Family Court division of the Law Department, said a mental health evaluation of the boy was continuing, as well as an investigation into the facts of the case. Ms. Brady said that by tomorrow, when a hearing is set in Brooklyn Family Court, the department could decide what charges, if any, to file.

But the comments of Mr. Bloomberg, who recently overruled the department in its appeal of a favorable workers' compensation decision for a former deputy mayor, Rudy Washington, suggested that he did not want to see the boy face the charges.

''We're going to talk to the Family Court judge and to A.C.S. and see what we can do,'' he said, referring to the Administration for Children's Services, the child welfare agency.

''Our prayers have to be with the poor young girl who died'' and her family, he continued. ''But I don't know what a penalty against an 8-year-old really would mean.''